


How it starts

by tucuxi



Series: Through the looking-glass: Naruto genderswap!AU [3]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Gen, Genderbending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-27
Updated: 2011-01-27
Packaged: 2017-10-16 21:03:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tucuxi/pseuds/tucuxi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iruka doesn’t want people to pity her.  She just wants them to <i>pay attention</i>.</p><p>Part of the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/6842">Through the Looking-Glass</a> genderswap AU universe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How it starts

This is how it starts: Iruka is walking across a tight-rope a month after the Kyuubi attack, balancing over cold-running water, and she can just _tell_ that everyone on the bank is paying attention to something else.  Not even the teacher is watching her, his head turned down to his clipboard: he isn’t even pretending to look.

At moments like this, Iruka feels like she’s disappeared.  It’s as if when her parents died, everyone stopped seeing her, too, even though she’s right here.  She could curl up and cry because of it, or spend hours at the memorial stone (there’s an older girl, a jounin who spends a lot of time there: people talk), but that just gets pity.  Iruka doesn’t want people to pity her. She just wants them to _pay attention_.

Iruka bites her lip, and pauses for a moment, feeling herself waver slightly. She smiles, before windmilling her arms dramatically and splashing into the fast-running stream.  When she pops up, spitting out water, and sweeping her bangs out of her face, the whole class is laughing, and she smiles in response, rubbing at the back of her head a little sheepishly: it worked!

“Young lady!  Get out of that water this instant!”  The teacher’s voice is outraged, and when Iruka pops up dripping wet and grinning, his eyes widen almost comically.  One of the girls giggles, one of the boys tries to whistle. Iruka sticks her tongue out at them, then looks down to see that her shirt has gone kind of see-through and you can see the lines of the mesh she’s wearing underneath pretty well.  She shrugs, and half-walks, half-swims to the bank.  The teacher pulls her out of the water, wraps her up in a towel, and tells her she’d better be dressed _properly_ the next time they do this exercise, while her friends cluster around them and ask her how cold the water was, and does she know how to swim?

Iruka grins, wide and pleased.  That was an _even better_ reaction than she’d hoped for.

* * *

A number of students have trouble in school the fall and winter after the Kyuubi attack, and the teachers seem to expect it for a few months.

Iruka does okay at first: she still works hard. But without her parents’ help training, she begins to fall behind; without her mother’s advice and example, Iruka does increasingly badly in the kunoichi lessons.  Privately, Iruka thinks that ikebana is kind of neat, but she knows she’ll never be as good at it as some of the other girls, and now she doesn’t have anyone to answer her questions about whether narcissus or hyssop would be better here, or how to balance size and color, and her arrangements come out wrong every time. Eventually she stops trying.  That way it’s all right with her if her arrangements are lopsided and mean things like “forgetfulness, unending friendship and distaste,” — she can laugh that off and go stand in the hallway making faces through the door at Anko when the teacher’s back is turned.  She doesn’t want to know what would happen if she really tried.  Iruka would far rather be ridiculous on purpose than unremarkable despite her best efforts.

Iruka is smart, and she does well on the written exams and theory, and she can diagram the chakra pathways and recite the Shinobi Code backwards and forwards and draw really good maps.  But that’s not enough, not when she stinks at genjutsu and can’t regularly get six shuriken in a row into the very center ring of a target.  She practices hard at home, but now when she struggles, nobody comes up behind her to help adjust her stance; no one brings her tea to help her relax while she’s studying. Iruka she works herself into tears night after night, trying and trying and never getting it quite right. She almost never stands out in class for skill anymore, or even for effort.

But people notice when she slips and falls, or when she almost stabs herself on a shuriken she’s about to throw, or when her jutsu go spectacularly, ridiculously wrong. In the end, the only weapon Iruka has against invisibility is her own failure, and she offers it up freely in exchange for smiles and yells and _attention_. 


End file.
